June 30, 2011
How To Get Free Quality Links

If getting free quality links for your website was easy I would be writing this blog post from Bali. Obtaining free quality links does require hard work, but it is not impossible if you are using the right tools. In this blog I will be giving you a few relatively easy steps and great tools to jump start your SEO for free.I hate to start with such an obvious SEO step, but just about every company should have a blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube account. You can set up these four properties in under two hours, and if you set aside an hour a week to contribute to each of them, their function will be met. All these do is establish your company as a viable entity that Google and other search engines can use to confirm that you are a real person. If you skip these beyond simple steps, you are missing out on some very low hanging fruit.

Now for a few not so obvious free link building tools. Create an account on social question & answer sites, with your website’s name and URL associated to it. Answer questions relevant to your niche on Quora, Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answer, Wiki How, AllExperts, AnswerBag, Yedda/AOL Answers, Mahalo Answers. These links will usually only get you no-follow links, which have slightly less link juice than a link from a relevant website, but they can definitely contribute to your overall SEO efforts.

Social Bookmarks are definitely a term that any experienced SEO’er has heard before, but designating a specific account for the sole purpose of obtaining links is an SEO step that should not be passed up on. Sign up for accounts with some of the prevalent social bookmark websites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Folkd, Delicious, MyLinkVault, Reddit, and many more. For a more extensive list visit this site. Save links to your site with each account, include your home page, blog page, about us page, and make sure to include the key terms you are targeting in the descriptions of your links.

Link bait is a term that aspiring SEO’ers should get acquainted with. Link bait is any piece of entertainment, or shareable content online that can link back to your site. An example of this could be an infographic, video, article, image, audio file, basically anything that someone can click on. While the possibilities might seem endless, a main objective that you should keep in mind while creating this content is relevancy to your niche, or industry. The content that you create will be easier to place on websites relevant to your company if the content is something people in your niche appreciate.

The last tip for getting great free links is my new favorite. There are sites out there that reporters use to obtain information, quotes, insider information, or just the point of view of an expert in a given field. Twitter recently rolled out Twitter for Newsrooms, there are various ways to link up with reporters there. Since 2009, Muck Rack has been a great aggregator of journalists tweets, and is a great place to link up with very well known news outlets. My new-ish favorite tool is going to have to go unnamed because it is my go to place to hear from journalists that need specific help with stories, and if one of my clients fit the bill, there is a free quality link back to my client’s site. My only hint is that this website gives journalists a hand.

I hope this information helps you improve your off-site SEO, but if not feel free to reach out to the SEO team at WPromote.